Travis placed his stick across the top of his shin pads and coasted, looking down into the ice and off to the far end–which wasn’t very far away–to check out the Panthers. He recognized Yantha immediately: big and dark and smooth. It looked as if he’d grown since Lake Placid. He looked at Billings, the quick little blond defenceman who was such a wonderful skater. Billings looked back, winked, and raised his stick in salute. He, too, had recognized his opponents. Travis remembered they’d exchanged autographs at the end of the Lake Placid tournament. He still had Billings’s autograph. He wondered if Billings had kept his.
It felt funny. It felt weird. It felt neat. He was happy for the first time since they’d gone out whale watching and come upon the floating bodies. The two officials came out, and the little ice surface seemed magically filled with skaters. They lined up for the faceoff, Sarah to take it, Travis to the side, and Nish well back by Jeremy. It was, Travis thought, just like playing shinny in the basement.
But as soon as the referee dropped the puck, the novelty turned to challenge. With only three on the ice, the players were free to go anywhere, yet in such a small area, there were few hiding places, and no place to coast and suck up your wind. There were, as well, no changes, meaning they had to take a whole new approach to the game. You couldn’t go flat out all the time. You had to pick your spots. You had to gather energy and not waste it. Never had Muck’s warnings about “skating around in circles like chickens with their heads cut off” made more sense.
Muck was still coach, but it wasn’t the same. With no changes, he could talk strategy only at the break. He could have yelled over the noise of the thin crowd, but Muck, of course, never yelled. Travis could hear Data screaming, and thought he heard Sam’s big voice a couple of times, and once he heard Lars yelling for them to slow it down!
Lars’s instructions were making more sense than they had in the dressing room. With the Owls swirling and the Panthers sticking with them, there was little point in direct passing. Better to drop it in an open space when you could see that Nish or Sarah was headed that way. Travis also found he was most effective in leaving passes and using his body to brush away his checker. But as for the advice to slow things down–how was that possible?
The games were two periods, twenty minutes of straight running time each, and at the break all six players and the two goaltenders simply collapsed onto their backs in exhaustion. They’d been going full out for most of the period, pausing only for the faceoffs and after goals. The two teams were almost perfectly balanced, with five goals for the Panthers, including a spectacular backhand roofer by Billings, and five for the Owls, including three pretty dekes by Sarah.
Travis’s lungs were burning, but he felt wonderful. The game had been spectacular–fun and clean, quick and well-played, like both a championship game and a Sunday afternoon on the frozen creek at home. He felt the pressure to win, but it came from himself and his teammates, not from the stands. And there was none of that terror of making a mistake that so often turned regular hockey games into dull demonstrations of how to dump a puck in and how to chip it back out.
Muck said something during the break that Travis never expected to hear coming out of his coach’s mouth: “You’re too predictable.”
Travis blinked, the salt of his sweat biting into his eyes. He was surprised at how much he was sweating.
“Try something they’re not expecting,” Muck said.
A hundred games of being coached by Muck flashed before Travis Lindsay’s eyes. He remembered the back pass that Muck had so hated. He remembered Muck’s frown when he tried that silly little dance of the puck off his skate blades. But now here was Muck telling Travis to cut loose. Use a little driveway ingenuity. Try some of those basement tricks.
The Panthers went ahead in the second, and final, period on two quick goals by Yantha, one of which almost ripped Jeremy’s arm off before bouncing through and over the line. Nish scored on a pass that accidentally clipped off Billings’s skate, and Sarah hit the goal post on a backhand after she’d cleanly beaten the Panthers’ goaltender.
Travis tried everything. He lost the puck in his own skates trying to click it up onto his blade, and Billings picked it off and scored. He tried a back pass, but Yantha read it perfectly and used Nish for a screen, firing a puck between Nish’s legs that found the far corner of the net.
The Panthers had a three-goal lead and Travis could hear the crowd getting louder. He could hear Data’s anxious, high-pitched voice calling for them to get going. But no sound came from Muck. Even if the Owls were down by ten goals, Muck would never shout.
Sarah picked up a rebound that Jeremy fed to the corner, then flipped the puck back into the far corner for Nish. Without even looking, Nish dumped the puck cross ice and bounced it off the boards for Sarah in full flight. She flew down the wing and blew a slapshot past the Panthers’ goaltender to reduce the lead to two.
With five minutes left and the tension rising, the Owls took their game up a level. Nish stickhandled end to end before slipping a drop pass back between his own legs to Travis, and Travis threw a quick pass across the crease to Sarah, who scored again.
A minute left, and Nish scored on a fabulous rush that forced Yantha to trip him as he flew past the Panthers’ big centre. Nish managed to take the shot by sweeping his stick blindly across the ice, but a second later crashed heavily into the boards.
Travis hated that sound. No, it wasn’t the sound at all; it was the silence he hated at the end of a bad fall. It was as if all the noises of the arena–the skating, the yelling, the crowd, the whistles, the puck on blades, the crash of the sliding body into the boards, the echoes–all suddenly came to a stop, with every breath in the building held for fear of losing all breath entirely.
Both Sarah and Travis raced for their fallen teammate. Muck was already over the boards and making his way across the ice, Mr. Dillinger, with the first-aid kit, slipping and sliding along behind him.
“Anyone in the crowd holding a video camera?” Nish asked as Travis and Sarah leaned over.
“What?” said Travis. He wondered how badly Nish had smashed his head into the boards.
“I wanna know if anyone caught my goal,” Nish said.
Sarah shook her head. “You’re pathetic.”
Nish grinned up, sweat covering his face. “I know,” he said with enormous pride.
Mr. Dillinger checked him over. The referee checked him over. They decided that nothing was broken and helped Nish to his feet. Sarah picked up his stick, Travis his gloves. The crowd began cheering, and the Panthers, led by Yantha, pounded their sticks on the ice in tribute.
Travis felt proud of his friend–right up until Nish began blowing kisses to the crowd like he was some famous actor taking a curtain call.
“Next time, I might hit him myself,” Sarah said, shaking her head.
Nish skated about for nearly a minute, then lifted his stick towards the referee to signal he had his wind back and was ready to finish the game.
The puck dropped and Sarah clipped it right out of the air back to Nish, who turned and raced back towards his own end.
“You’re goin’ the wrong way, idiot!” Sam’s big voice bellowed through the rink. Travis could hear them laughing in the stands.
But Nish knew exactly what he was doing. With Yantha giving chase and the Panthers’ other forward trying to cut off his passing lane to Sarah, Nish used the net to shake free of Yantha and, reversing suddenly, headed to the far side, with Yantha now trying to cut back across ice to head him off.
It was a brilliant tactic. The other forward, thinking Yantha was out of position, moved to cut off Nish. Nish waited, teasing with the puck on the end of his stick, and just as both Panthers came down on him, he flipped a backhand saucer pass that hit Sarah perfectly as she moved through centre.
Sarah snapped a quick pass to Travis, who moved over the blueline with it, Billings trying to stay level between the two rushing Owls.
Travis faked a pass to Sarah, but Billings was too smart to bite. He wasn’t playing the puck; he was playing the zone, trying to stay between the two so Travis couldn’t slip a pass across the crease to Sarah and would have to take a shot from well out.
Travis pulled the puck back tight to his skates and cut for centre. Sarah, reading him perfectly, cut from the opposite direction, hoping the criss-cross might confuse Billings.
But again, Billings was too smart. He kept to his position, and just as the two Owls began to cross, he began to go down, hoping to use his falling body to block the drop pass he believed Travis was planning.
Travis held. He held, and everything seemed to slow. He held, and Sarah blew past him, and Billings, already committed, went down onto his side, spinning perfectly to cut off the pass that never came.
Travis held, and drifted. As he slowed, everything else sped up, and instantly he understood what Lars had meant. Going slow, as long as it surprises, can open up space just as surely as speed can.
He was all alone now. Sarah had cut across, her skates now rasping on a hard turn. Billings was lost, his stick teasing helplessly like the sword of a defeated warrior.
The goaltender’s pads stuttered. Travis held still, and waited. He seemed to be drifting like an astronaut, defying gravity, and the goalie, rattled by this neverending pause, gambled by flopping to his side and stacking his pads.
In a normal game, with two defencemen pressing him in the slot, Travis would have panicked and shot, praying the puck would somehow trickle through.
But this was not a normal game. This was 3-on-3 hockey, with everyone else out of the play, just Travis and the Panthers’ goaltender alone with a slow-moving puck and a waiting net.
He held, seemingly forever, and continued to drift: past the goaltender’s stick, past the stacked pads, past the skate blades until, finally, there was a small unblocked channel into the net.
Travis fired a backhand, low along the ice.
He heard so many sounds at once it was almost impossible to separate one from another: the horn, a whistle, cheering, cursing, Sarah screaming as she cut behind the net from the other side.
“TRAAAAVISSSS!”
Travis spun, his back slamming hard into the boards, but he felt nothing. He could see the referee, his hand pointing to the back of the net. He could see Yantha roaring back up ice, slamming his stick angrily. He could see the dejected look of the Panthers’ goaltender, beaten.
The Screech Owls number-one team had won its first game.
They shook hands as the Zamboni came out to clean the ice. Yantha just slapped at Travis’s glove, but Billings took his hand warmly.
“Nice goal, Travis,” he said.
“Thanks,” Travis said. He couldn’t believe the little Portland defenceman still knew his name. Perhaps he had kept the card with its autograph–but he hadn’t the nerve to ask.
The other Owls came onto the ice in their street clothes: Muck, Mr. Dillinger, Sam pushing through like she owned the place, then Lars.
Travis and Lars high-fived at centre ice.
“Slow enough for you?” Travis asked.
“It worked, didn’t it?” Lars laughed.
“Perfectly.”